The weather has been cooling off. We've been using our fireplace. The pups are appreciating the cushion in front of the fire.
The man finally came to blow out the sprinkler system. Everything has changed in the front since last year, but we showed him our diagram of the new front yard, with each sprinkler/drip head marked, and it was easy. We won't need to water anything until spring.
I did get some knitting done this week. I have only five rounds to go to finish the colorwork. It will be straightforward after that.
We had our Madroña pop-up meeting party on Tuesday, during the World Series. It was fun, as always. It was nice to see everyone, and I could keep an eye on the game while we chatted and sipped.
I was cheering for Milwaukee. The reason is rather convoluted. I grew up in Boston and was a fan of the Boston Red Sox and the Boston Braves. After we moved to California, the Braves moved to Milwaukee, and I kept up my creds as a fan. During the 1957 World Series, I listened to the game during lunchtime at school on my new little transistor portable radio and while moving from one class to the next. (The games were during the daytime back then, and there were no playoffs.) I knew the names of all the players and was thrilled when they won. Later, when they moved to Atlanta, I continued to cheer for them. This year neither the Red Sox nor the Braves were in the series, so I had to pick a team I wanted to win. Since the Brewers are in Milwaukee as the Braves once were, that was enough of a connection, but we also have family in Wisconsin, so that was another reason. It was fun to watch the teams play.
We got a bird feeder for the backyard. It's designed to foil squirrels. Little birds that don't weigh much can sit on the little perches and feed, but if something heavy pushes down on the perch, it sinks, closing a little door over the opening. We have squirrels that visit our backyard. This one thought he could foil the system. It didn't work, but it was amazing to watch him try.
I have been looking for a solution to the problem of not being able to hear well enough to understand bits of the sermon. The fact that our priest is from Mississippi should be no problem for me, because my mother was born and grew up in that state and had a pretty heavy accent, especially if she had just been talking on the phone with one of her sisters. It's just a word here and there I can't hear, and those words often seem to be important, based on the reaction from the congregation. I tried an app last week that's supposed to help hard-of-hearing people understand what others are saying. I found I couldn't use it at all, because it requires internet. We have to turn off our WiFi during the service, because it interferes with the streaming of the service, so that didn't work. I found this one that doesn't require WiFi. It transcribed what it thought our priest was saying, but it missed more words than I did, simply skipping them, and it changed some words into others that changed the meaning, so it may not work for me. It made the kind of mistakes AI often does. However, I'm going to see if this app has the ability to choose different accents. It has different languages, so maybe. I'll have to play with it.
It was All Saints' Day or All Souls' Day on Sunday, so we sang a fun arrangement of "When the Saints Come Marching In." I guess we did OK, because we got some applause, after some clapping in time to the music.
We had bell practice after coffee hour. It's still difficult for me, but I'm getting better.
Also this week, I had to make a trip to the Social Security Adminstration to (finally) straighten out my name problem. I was allowed to use "Peggy" as my name back in 1965, although all my other official documents have my name as "Margaret." They locked me out of my account this year because of the discrepancy, so I had to visit the office in person with my drivers license and official birth certificate. (No marriage certificate/license was needed, which is good because I only have the one the minister provided, which is unofficial.) Social Security was able to accomplish the task quickly. The clerk who helped me at SSA in Bend told me they have several people a day come in with this issue. She recommended that I contact my bank to let them know that my name would be different on the next payment.
Saturday night was Halloween. We placed Victor in the small window next to our door with a sign next to the doorbell with big letters that read: "Beware! Victor loves sweets!" The trick-or-treaters really seemed to enjoy it.
We had a lot of youngsters stop by. Some of the younger ones not only got a treat; they also got a copy of the book that Victor appears in: Our Favorite Verses.
Johan wore his costume to school on Friday. He was the Phantom of the Opera.
Of course, we had the time change Saturday night/Sunday morning. I've been working the dogs up to staying up later at night and sleeping later in the morning, so I'm hoping they won't be getting me up at 5:00 AM. Church on Sunday was a combined service at 9:00 AM instead of 8:00 or 10:00 AM. It felt like 10:00 for those of us in the choir, so it was a nice way to ease into the new time.
This morning, the dogs and I woke up at 7:00 AM. I can live with that!
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What's in The Doll's Storybook: It has become a tradition to rerun this poem on or before Halloween. Here's Victor the Vulture, patterned after Poe's "The Raven."
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